


Choranaptyxia

by SkyHighDisco



Category: The Grand Tour (TV) RPF, Top Gear (UK) RPF
Genre: Graphic Violence, James "I didn't ask for any of this" May, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Why do all things happen to HIM
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-22 16:53:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30041790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkyHighDisco/pseuds/SkyHighDisco
Summary: Something lives in James' garage. It's not a cat.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 4





	Choranaptyxia

**Author's Note:**

> A while ago, this fandom has been polluted by my November 2020 daily project ‘Night Shift’ which consisted of weird and some rather inappropriate short stories. This one is a mini-sequel to [Chapter 2](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27324388/chapters/66817576#workskin), which in retrospect would make sense to read first, but basically, there’s an alien in James’ garage which is capable of shrinking and enlarging to whichever size so it’s able to fit in tiny spaces like exhaust pipes and lidded cups. It’s mostly dormant and loves to sleep. When it wakes up, though, it’s another story.

Schubert’s F-minor Fantasia for piano for 4 hands helps calm his nerves, but James also remembers to have a wall behind his back. He’d usually hum along but now he’s just too nervous.

It’s been almost two weeks since that infamous night. And now he enters the garage like a child coming back into the house after a ceramic-flying argument between his parents. Careful, cautious, tense and scurry-eyed, James spends at least ten minutes standing at the top of the stairs. His long-coated tuxedo cat Dvořák is curled around his legs, and although it’s a ridiculous idea that something this small would give him any sort of comfort, it is true. James feels comically safer. Perhaps it gives him the idea that he isn’t entirely alone.

However, because Dvořák is a cat, he is very self-assured and aloof rather than loyal, so he doesn’t follow James’ steps down the stairs — one at a time, careful like probing down a minefield — but remains standing guard. That, or he’s just completely game to offer James as a lamb for slaughter.

James dislikes the enormity of his garage for the first time in his life. The lights still aren’t fixed and recent events only encourage him to speed up the process. He’s ready to phone the electrician as soon as the coast is cleared. As much as he despises the mere thought…

He immediately presses the button for the garage door to open and blessed daylight to seep in. The mechanism and screeching appear deafening after the suspenseful, observing silence, and it makes his buzzing nerves jumpstart.

Everything appears to be still. The cars, the motorcycles, all where he has left them. Not a thing out of place; something his OCD-ed brain is always impeccable to notice. James doesn’t have a particular desire to approach them with half the enthusiasm as he usually would. In fact, the farther he is, the better. Especially from the exhaust pipes.

However, the routine part of his mind is making his fingers twitch. It’s been far too long since his hands have fiddled with the tools and in spite of the situation, it’s sort of a habitual cycle that has become too engraved into his life to be disregarded in such a manner even in such an apocalyptic case.

At first he walks on the tips of his shoes, bent in the back and knees like a soldier in action. He looks about, flinches at the tiniest noises that send his heart aflutter a bit quicker. But he never sees anything. Only the cat flicking his tail left and right. At least the mild background noises from the outside help ease his mind a little bit.

When he plugs in the small radio on the work table and pleasant piano sounds fill the corners of the garage and bounce away to the open door, he breathes out. His shoulders slump. Not entirely. But he doesn’t feel trapped in a tight iron armour of suspense anymore.

Step by careful step, he dares to pick up a toolbox, open it slowly, inspect every tool, get barely convinced nothing is strange. Then the hair-raising part included approaching a motorbike and lighting a torch into its exhaust without the fear of having an eye gouged out.

However, bit by bit, muscle by muscle, James gradually eases his way into comfort. First working with his back facing the wall until he ultimately convinces himself he’s completely made up the entire ordeal and was panicking for no reason.

He is so completely fixed on screwing a beautifully delicate bolt into the bike frame that he doesn’t register Dvořák yowl threateningly until an out-of-place _click_ cuts through Schubert.

James’ muscles, lulled into false idleness by the coping mechanism, instantly spring to the highest point of tension and he swiftly turns around.

He doesn’t see a monster. Not at first glance, at least.

Instead, there’s a young man, not six feet away, and James has difficulty determining his age; he could be anywhere between mid-twenties to late thirties. His appearance is extremely dishevelled, sandy-blonde hair greasy, the dark circles under his eyes can’t be ironed out by God Himself, his cheekbones jut out like a pair of mountain peaks, and the foul odour he gives off makes James jolt.

He is so perplexed that he doesn’t see the switchblade in the man’s right hand until after he quite stupidly stammers, “Uh, this is private property.”

The yob, sweaty and clearly high as a kite on whatever content of the spoon he’s injected into his arm, lifts the knife and points it at James; the tip of it is shivering. “Keys. To that one. Now.”

James looks back at where the lad’s knife pointed to. It’s his Alpine.

A flashback makes him think how it’s ironic everything always seems to happen around that car. The thought is as sudden as it is useless.

James quickly considers his options. He’s not in the best position. He doesn’t carry a phone to the garage with him; it’s the only pastime in the day he feels belongs only to him, and no phone call is important enough to disturb it.

And it’s so poetically come to bite him in the arse now.

Sarah isn’t home, thank heavens. It’s just him and the cats.

If he yells, it can attract the neighbours’ attention, but he may get punctured before his first “help” can properly echo.

Best to try to solve this diplomatically. It normally always works.

“Listen”, he begins in the calmest voice he can muster while also making to straighten from the crouch. Very, very slowly. “Why don’t we sort this out like blokes, eh? We can arrange something, just put the knife down, alright?”

“Keys to the fucking car, mate, come on.”

The young man’s voice is louder, teetering on the edge of verbal chaos, which he obviously isn’t far away from.

“Please don’t”, James tries to reason in a voice calmer than he expected to have in him. “You _will_ regret it. I’m telling you this for your own good. Turn around and walk out and I won’t report you for trespassing. Please, I’m begging you.”

“Just give me the sodding keys or I’ll drill you another hole to take a fucking waz through!” The barrier of the man’s jitters finally breaks. He starts to shake like a leaf.

“This car isn’t worth your life. Please, I’m asking you to leave. I can make—”

The young man is more agile than he looks; James gets cuffed across the face so quickly and so hard that he falls back on the floor, mercifully somehow avoiding the sharp tools. He isn’t sure if he yells. There is a sharp line of biting pain stretching across his left cheek and a thin trickle starts worming its way down his face. James isn’t sure if it was the blade, the handle, or some ring on the back of the man’s finger.

“Are you fucking deaf?! Give me the fucking keys or I’ll gauge your eyes out, I’m fucking serious. Now!”

If James didn’t want to shout before, the man’s yelling is surely loud enough to attract attention, which James begs for. But he can’t count on a mere chance. There may not be time for it.

Breathing heavily, James looks up at the shelf a meter or two before him.

He also happens to glance at a ceramic lidded floral-ornate mug. It was Francie’s gift from the Clarkson family vacation in Greece a long time ago. It’s open a slit. Something thin, complicated, and turquoise is hanging out of it.

The brush of turquoise slithers under the safety of the lid like a snake’s tongue, closing it completely with a soft sound. The movement is very quick, but James’ eyes don’t miss it.

He feels guilty at how quickly his brain conjures up the solution.

“Yeah. Okay. Alright. Easy. It’s up there. Can I…?”

James slowly and cautiously looks over his shoulder, finger pointing up. The man looks out of his mind. James attempts to narrow the yob’s lividly wide eyes with a calmness he hopes he shows the best he can.

A jut of the chin is the only form of confirmation he gets.

James is still careful when he slowly straightens himself into the upright position, grabbing a shelf by shelf, still feeling a bit dizzy from the stroke. Or sheer, horrid panic.

James grabs the lid of the mug. Pauses. Tries one last time.

“Look. Last chance. I don’t want to be responsible for what happens next. You can still walk away and this doesn’t have to get messy.”

“Stop fucking stonewalling or I’ll kill you. Fucking keys, you wanker! Now!”

It seemed to James that the likelihood of him losing his life is equal whether he removes that lid or not. He can still get shanked, and without the phone in his hands, it could be minutes or hours before somebody finds him. This way…

“Lord, forgive me”, he silently whispers. Then hastily removes the lid.

He ducks low.

The suddenness of the movement causes the cup to start falling.

The agile body inside of it already begins slithering out of the encapsulated sanctuary and angrily expanding. It’s completely out of the cup before it can crash to the floor. Almost like it merely materialized.

Dvořák screams from the doorway.

“What the- -” James hears the young man begin to yell and then it’s replaced by an unintelligible screaming.

It isn’t before it’s muffled — like something covered or engulfed his head — and immediately after, it’s replaced by horrible sounds of a heavy, violent crunch. James relates the sound to a childhood memory of an old tree branch that snapped under his weight.

The comparison makes him shiver.

The whole time he attempts to crawl away towards the door to the house. He helplessly whimpers, not wanting to think what the sounds represent. Screaming is completely gone now. It’s replaced by grunts, rumbles and noises that aren’t in a range of human capabilities. They hurt James’ brain.

He almost reaches the steps when an enormous, scaled, agitated tail slams onto the ground before him with a loud, exploding sound. James yelps and fights the instinct to look behind. But thankfully, the tail immediately slides out of the way — it leaves a huge crack in the floor.

James scrambles across it and up the steps, unable to coordinate himself as everything that makes him human is lost in the barrage of adrenaline.

As far as he is concerned, he’s a gazelle now.

A half-hiss, half-metallic screech comes from behind and James realizes it’s only him left now.

He throws himself through the door and turns to look.

A huge circular mass of sharp teeth, many mouths and seven-petal-parted maw is surging towards him in a warp speed.

James kicks the door shut.

It closes in the creature’s face.

And then everything is unnaturally quiet save for his heaving breaths and Dvořák yowling.

Thank _heavens_ Sarah is out of the country.

James almost leans with his back against the door, but thinks against it and ends up just sitting dumbly in the middle of the floor, waiting for the inevitable stroke to end his miserable life.

For better or worse, it doesn’t happen.

Bordeaux is sitting a bit farther with a completely unimpressed “Oh, so you aren’t dead yet?” look on his face. Contrary to Dvořák, he’s entirely passive.

“Fusker would be the same”, says James to no one.

Then he bursts into a torrent of tears for exactly ten seconds. Then his mind shuts down for a very long time during which he doesn’t remember much.

When he musters the courage to peek back in — because he has to close the garage door, lest someone else thinks it's free real estate — he finds nothing. Only a little bit of goo in the middle of the floor. No trace of the intruder ever existing.

Not even the knife.

Before he can question his own sanity, James slams the garage door button and fights the urge to run out and slam the door shut like a small child running towards his bedroom when the hallway lights go off. He listens intently into the silence for several intense seconds before being awarded a small clinky shift from the direction of the shelf. Sounds like his windproof ashtray.

Just a note as to what not to approach in the near future.

James locks the door behind him twice and stuffs the keyhole with pieces of paper towel.

He tells the others he’s peeved the cat when questioned about the wound. For the broken present, though, he can find no sufficient excuse.


End file.
